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Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

salesforceben.com

341–350 of 409 posts

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big orgs have plenty of people that need to justify their salaries, I mean it, I'm 100% convinced you could fire half the staff of a big organization, going heavy with the management roles and lighter on operational ones and the company would become more productive and efficient. And the higher the people in the pyramid are the better they are at selling their ideas in their neverending quest for recognition, fat bon…

Twitter as an example, showed us that the staff really do matter

Seems like an odd takeaway to me - they fired 90% of their staff and now pump out new features way more quickly than old Twitter.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#342
post #33

Current SFDC software engineer - this is just cover for a widespread engineering hiring freeze since the layoffs in January 2023. There's a ton of pressure to control costs after the near shareholder revolt that caused the layoffs. The public nature of the announcement is certainly marketing for our AI offerings as well, but at this point I think most engineers are just worried there will be additional layoffs, in th…

I really don't care generally if a business feels the need to hype things like this - but these kinds of announcements have downstream effects on salaries and job availability far outside a company like this. Other management/C-suites are gonna hear "we replaced all our engineers with AI!" and similarly slow down hiring/etc. This is already being seen throughout the industry, I am aware, but such a visible player mak…

It is the general insecurity about new tech although I haven't seen a single job being replaced by AI yet. And I also think the market for SWE is still very good though. And the only ones that use AI on a large scale for that matter.

Salesforce came into discussion as a CRM solution for us, but the salesman was so arrogant that he was quickly booted out. If first thought it would be nice to develop against a more modern system, but today I am glad we never jumped on that train. And I hear it devolved into the same mess that CRM systems somehow always seem to be.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#343
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's just an ad for Agentforce. They have been aggressively advertising on TV lately. One ad shows a restaurant seating customers in the rain because they aren't using AI. The other ad shows someone buying clothes that don't match because AI wasn't suggesting them. (They also serve the customer shrimp, which he doesn't like.) Looking at weather forecasts and rescheduling reservations has nothing to do with AI,…

Like you I am highly skeptical of bullish AI narratives, even if AI clearly represents value. However, your analysis has one flaw. Our biggest corporate customer is unwilling to give testimonials about our (niche) application, because it represents a competitive advantage for them and they don’t want to educate their competitors. In theory one could imagine similar mechanisms going on in AI.

I kind of expected that reply and it just sounds like cold fusion to me. "We'll tell you how it works some other time, what matters is that it's going to change the world!" It didn't.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#344
post #329
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plan is that others will need to hire expensive Salesforce consultants anyway. I don’t think they are getting rid of those people.

The plan is also to force existing customers to re-negotiate their existing long term contracts (many made on favourable terms a few years ago) to include the agentforce and data cloud stuff. The window of opportunity for this is now: people seem to believe the 'agents' are something really quite new and different, and we haven't yet reached the peak of the hype curve. (Whereas in the boring, backwards enterprise com…

Well it would be lonely out there if all of the company is CEO and rest automated agents. Some shareholders might even ask why they need a CEO.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#345
I came across that post recently and lookup the salesforce careers and this not the case they are still hiring in 2025.

https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/jr265886/software-eng...

this was the post https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...

So i doubt the sales force CEO said that actually.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG used to over-employ not just due to ZIRP, but also in the fear that their engineers would build competing products. These companies enjoy healthy margins. Unemployed engineers can duplicate the core functionality and offer it for less.

This was always a myth and never a real thing, except for at the highest, bleeding edge talent levels. Especially for Enterprise Saas companies like Salesforce/Microsoft/Oracle/etc who know full well that their real competency isn’t actually the software…it’s distribution. Employees aren’t choosing to use those products, they get forced into them by management/IT or literal monopoly. Sales is everything in B2B softwa…

> Sales is everything in B2B software and always has been. Product-led growth in B2B has always been fantasy erotic-fiction outside of chat/notes apps.

PLG creates the distribution to actually implement Sales effectively and at scale for B2B. Even those companies that originally were purely Sales-led now have a strong PLG component. PLG is far from be a fantasy, but now it's almost a must have motion to build distribution and long term healthy business viability considering also that Enterprise software is living a consumerization moment. Not to mention that the next generations of users and buyers buy and expect software to be different from the past, this is already happening.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#347
I came across same post here:

https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...

and when opened the salesforce career page they are still hiring for software engineers in 2025.

https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/jr265886/software-eng...

I doubt the authenticity of source and also i work very closely with AI-agents and this is not the case as it is represented on social media.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#348
post #322
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stack, Zoom, Trello, Dropbox, Canva, Notion, AirTable.. Asana, Figma, Miro, Box, Evernote, ClickUp, Basecamp, Zapier, HubSpot, Calendly, Shopify, WordPress

atlassian is the big one - jira actually beat out basecamp (and fogbugz), despite them being quite similar at the beginning, and ousted the incumbent that is ibm rational suite and their ilk.

They did it by one simple trick - becoming the first ones who offered free license for open-sourcers. They invented this idea. After that, they needed to do nothing more, almost automatically becoming a monopoly. I was there working for one of the early competitors who was thrown in the dust by that decision of Atlassian and was too late to realise they had to do the same - and folded two years later.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#350
How does this trend cope with the inevitable commoditization of AI? I mean, when having the best software engineers doesn't make the difference anymore because every company can afford the AI doing their job, presumably at comparable efficiency?
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